Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 98.
(refine search)
Journal Article
Target zones for exchange rates?
An examination of proposals to improve the international monetary system by creating central exchange rates and a discussion of why such a policy might not be in the best interest of the United States.
Journal Article
A new role for the Exchange Stabilization Fund
Recently, the U.S. Treasury announced a new, temporary insurance program for U.S. money-market mutual funds. To guarantee payment of these funds? liabilities, the Treasury will use the assets of its Exchange Stabilization Fund. Created in the 1930s to stabilize the exchange value of the dollar, it has been tapped on occasion to supply loans to foreign countries in financial distress. This latest use of ESF assets is unlike anything the Fund has been used for before.
Journal Article
Comment--Intervention and the dollar's decline
This comment will explain the differences and respecify some of the equations to dispel any misconceptions in Humpage's earlier article of the same title.
Working Paper
The Federal Reserve as an informed foreign-exchange trader: 1973-1995
If official interventions convey private information useful for price discovery in foreign-exchange markets, then they should have value as a forecast of near-term exchange-rate movements. Using a set of standard criteria, we show that approximately 60 percent of all U.S. foreign-exchange interventions between 1973 and 1995 were successful in this sense. This percentage, however, is no better than random. U.S. intervention sales and purchases of foreign exchange were incapable of forecasting dollar appreciations or depreciations. U.S. interventions, however, were associated with more moderate ...
Working Paper
Swedish intervention and the Krona float, 1993–2002
Using a set of standard success criteria, we show that Riksbank foreign-exchange interventions between 1993 and 2002 lacked forecast value; that is, the observed number of successes was not significantly greater--and usually substantially smaller--than the number one would anticipate given the martingale nature of exchange-rate movements. Under some success criteria, the Riksbank exhibited negative forecast value, implying that the market could have profited by taking a position opposite that of the bank. Moreover, the likelihood of success was independent of such conditioning factors as the ...
Journal Article
Rising relative prices or inflation: why knowing the difference matters
Almost everyone uses the word inflation to refer to any increase in prices, but it ought to be reserved for a just one kind of price increase. True inflation has a different cause?and a different cure?than the price increases of goods and services caused by constantly changing supply and demand conditions. The Federal Reserve can and should act to control inflation, but when relative-price changes are putting pressure on businesses and consumers, the Fed can do little.
Journal Article
A critique of monetary protectionism
An argument against attempts to achieve current-account objectives through monetary manipulation of nominal exchange rates, with an explanation of why such tampering--which for various reasons might appear politically attractive--ultimately harms economic welfare.
Working Paper
Do energy-price shocks affect core-price measures?
This paper investigates the relationship between energy-price shocks and three core measures of inflation in a vector autoregression model that incorporates measures of monetary policy and inflation expectations. The sample set includes data at monthly frequencies from 1980 through 2000. The authors find that that positive energy-price shocks have significant, though small, effects on all core-price measures after a lag of 12 to 18 months, but that negative shocks have no discernable impact. The results suggest that relative energy-price changes do not distort the inflation signals that ...
Journal Article
Voluntary export restraints: the cost of building walls
An illustration of the cost and employment effects of Japanese voluntary export restraints on new-car imports to the U.S.
Conference Paper
Introduction: context, issues and contributions